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Máster en Democracia y Gobierno 2011 - 2012 CP Departamento de Ciencia Política y Relaciones Internacionales Seminario de X Investigación Universidad Autónoma de Madrid Aaa aaaa Working Papers Online Series www.uam.es/wpcpolitica Estudio/Working Paper 143/2012 Language Policies and Language Ideologies in Contemporary Catalonia Dr. Roberto Garvía Universidad Carlos III de Madrid Dr. Thomas Jeffrey Miley University of Cambridge 1 Part One: The normative and legitimizing discourse of Catalan nationalism Uneven Development, Xenophobic Fears, and Romantic Nationalism The nationalist movement in Catalonia emerged in the nineteenth century, a product of dynamics associated with uneven capitalist development. While Catalonia witnessed the radical social transformation of industrialization, the rest of Spain did not (with the notable exception of the Basque Country). This led to conflicts of interest over economic policy and to an increasing disenchantment among Catalan industrialists with the Spanish state, which came to be perceived as effectively captured by large land-owning interests and either unwilling or otherwise unable to protect domestic and imperial textile markets from the scourge of international competition. Canonical historical accounts have stressed the causal link between these economic conflicts over protectionism and the percolation of regionalist consciousness (Viçens Vives). From the start, such consciousness was impregnated with a sense of cultural superiority, as reflected in a set of stereotypes about industriousness versus laziness not uncommon in comparatively over-developed regions of poor countries (Hirschman, Linz). This sense of cultural superiority was combined with a sense of demographic insecurity. Xenophobic fears became latently diffused throughout the region’s middle strata in reaction to the onset of internal migration, as successive waves of migrant peasants from poorer regions flocked to the factories and began to proliferate among the ranks of the emergent industrial proletariat. Images of godless, anarchist, African-blooded, illiterate. Castilian-speaking working class hordes were correspondingly constructed and construed as an existential menace threatening to tear asunder the Catalan social fabric (Marfany). Even so, the region’s emergent nationalist movement did not merely reflect and spread crass notions of cultural superiority and xenophobic fears of the proletariat and of proletarianization. Instead, its rhetorical idiom was infused with a heavy dose of romanticism as well, an ideological current which had been imported and adapted from elsewhere in Europe – most notably, Belgium, Germany, 2 Hungary, Italy, and Poland. The spokesmen of European romanticism were poets and novelists, who typically “introduced a cult of the mediaeval or pre-modern past,” and who valorized vernaculars for allegedly embodying “the accumulated transcript of the experience of past generations” (Anderson). The Catalan variant of this romantic current would congeal in the Renaixença, an intellectual movement which pursued the “rebirth” or “reawakening” of the Catalan culture. As it would elsewhere, romantic agitation in favor of the local culture soon gave way to political expression, with the establishment of the Centre Catalá in 1886. By the end of the century, a full-fledged nationalist political movement in the region had been born, one that would stress the importance of the Catalan language as the “ànima del poble” (or “spirit of the Catalan people”). The romantic influence on the first generation of “Catalanist” political discourse is more than evident in one of the movement’s foundational texts, Enric Prat de la Riba’s La nacionalit catalana (1906). Prat de la Riba singled out language as the most important characteristic that defined the Catalan nation vis-à-vis other nations. For Prat de la Riba, nation and language were co-terminus, part and parcel of a unique Catalan Volkgeist, up to the point where “one’s own language is the most powerful instrument of nationalization and therefore for the maintenance of the life of a nationality” (qtd in Conversi 1990: 54). The romantic notion that the Catalan language is the most important facet or even essence of a differentiated Catalan identity has remained a dominant current in the intellectual and political history of Catalan nationalism.1 This main current has likewise been consistently complimented with strong undercurrents of beliefs about cultural superiority, as well as projections of xenophobic fears. 1 On the dominant role of language in the early Catalan nationalist movement, see also Paulston 1987, Payne 1971, Mar Molinero 2000 and Bonfiglio 2010: 29-30 3 The Dialectic of “Castilianization” versus “Catalanization” The extent of ethno-linguistic heterogeneity in Catalonia is a crucial demographic trait that distinguishes the dynamics of micro-nationalist mobilization there from its counterparts in many other advanced capitalist democratic contexts, such as Quebec, Scotland, or Flanders. Such internal ethno-linguistic diversity is itself frequently invoked as a justification for the urgency of measures to promote and protect the local language.2 The valorization, “normalization,” protection and promotion of the Catalan language advocated by the nationalist movement has invariantly been expressed as a form of resistance to the process of “Castilianization.” Catalonia is of course the home of the Catalan language, a language with a long and rich literary tradition, whose cultural revival during the latter half of the nineteenth century immediately preceded and fueled the birth of the nationalist movement in the region. But another language is spoken there as well – namely, Castilian, also known as Spanish, one of the world’s dominant languages. Precisely because the Catalan language finds itself in competition and conflict on its very home terrain against Castilian, a much more powerful, indeed dominant world language, Defenders of Catalan language policies have frequently argued that proactive state measures of protection are required to structure the incentives of participants in the Catalan “public sphere” and in Catalan “civil society” to employ the local tongue. Without proactive measures, “language protectionists” insist, the Castilian-language monopoly of these spheres, itself in no small part an ill-begotten fruit of Franquist cultural discrimination, would have stood little chance of being effectively rolled back. There has been some debate among historians about both the extent and the cause of the presence of Castilian in Catalonia as far back as the Old Regime. The debate centers on: (1) how far the gradual process of “Castilianization” in some spheres of activity had already advanced before the triumph of 2 The field of Catalan socio-linguistics is rife with such forms of justification. For two fine overviews of the field, see Boix and Vila 1998, Vallverdú 1998. 4 the liberal revolution of the late 1830’s; and (2) whether this process was a product of external imposition alone, or alternatively, whether it was a response to internal demand as well.3 But regardless of when and how the Castilian language was initially introduced, it is clear that by the middle of the nineteenth century its use had become relatively widespread. Indeed, according to Joan Lluís Marfany, after the liberal revolution, the presence of Castilian would no longer merely be the product of a slow and gradual social process; instead, it came to be deliberately (though ineffectively) pursued by the Spanish authorities, out of an ideological commitment to building a Spanish nation and thus to ensuring that all citizens could speak the Castilian language (2001, p. 413). The new form of linguistic consciousness embodied in the Renaixença caused certain segments of Catalan society to begin actively resisting this process of “Castilianization.”4 From the start, the Catalan nationalists were linguistic militants. They agitated for “linguistic normalization,” which for them implied: (1) the re-imposition of the language in those spaces from which it had been excluded, such as in the administration of justice, the educational system, and the bureaucracy; (2) the codification of the language; and (3) the cleansing of it from “impurities” and instances of linguistic interference (Marfany 2001, p. 16). In 1914, after over a decade of ruling at the level of the Diputació de Barcelona, the nationalists, under the leadership of Enric Prat de la Riba and Francesc Cambó and organized in the Lliga Regionalista, were able to get the Spanish government of the Restoration monarchy to grant Catalonia a limited degree of autonomy, with the creation of the Mancomunitat de Catalunya. Under its auspices, the Lliga would promote several measures of “linguistic normalization,” intended to re- introduce the Catalan language into public life (Carr 1996, pp. 549-555).5 3 For three opposed positions in this debate, see Ferrer 1985, Anguera 1997, and Marfany 2001. 4 For summary overviews of this long and complicated process of “linguistic awakening,” see Vicens Vives (1986: 165-180), Fontana (1998: 409-448); and Termes (1987: 130-137). Also of much interest is the more recent historiographical debate between Pere Anguera and Joan-Lluís Marfany, sparked initially by Anguera’s critique (1997) of the ubiquity of anachronism in works such as Ferrer (1985). In turn, Joan-Lluís Marfany (2001) has critiqued Anguera for relying on anachronisms of his own. 5 For the classic treatment of the Lliga, see Molas

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